DR. CRICKENBERGER
SPRING 2016
UWRT1103
Coversheet (10% of final grade)
Specifications and Requirements
Final Portfolio “Website”
Please complete and submit this Cover Sheet as a Word document on Moodle prior to the beginning of class on Tuesday May 3, 2015. In addition, you will need to submit a hard copy version at the beginning of class on this same date.
_x__ A link to your website must be submitted on Moodle under the URL heading prior to the deadline. Include an active link to the website URL here:
http://hcricken.wix.com/doubletake
_x__ The website and each of its required pages must be titled. Include your title here and explain why you chose it:
"Doubletake: Stereoscopic Vision, Combinatory Play, & Project-Based Inquiries Into the Virtual"
I chose this title because after much consideration, I realized that two key forces were at work in my inquiry project: the duality of my perspective (teacher of the class/"student" doing the work) and the manner in which my understanding of teh "virtual" evolved to include arts of all kind in so far as a work of art functions as both an "approximation of the real" and as a thing in itself in the real world. This duality tied nicely to the stereoscopic qualities of Google Cardboard--the two lenses, the two images, combining in the mind of the reader as one 3-D image. "Combinatory play" is the method by which I created the project. I used painting as a way of getting at the concept of the virtual at times when I was tired of dealing with the topic directly. Over time, I began to see that this art form was a physical manifestation of the virtual, one which could be represented digitally or taken as a real object in the real world. Of course, saying all of this now, it is still left to be determined whether or not the world that we classify as "real" is virtual or not. We are always missing something; our bodies limit our perception--our place in time and space limit our perception as well...so in a way, it's all virtual!
__x_ The website must include an epigraph Include your epigraph here and explain why you chose it and how you incorporated it into your website:
I included 2 epigraphs, sticking with my dualistic stereoscopic theme. The first one engages the manner in which painting is both a "real" world activity, creating something new in the physical world. The second was about the manner in which technologies alter our perspective--ie the Google Cardboard allows us to see past as present, distant as near. Both quotes are by artists. The quotes can be found below:
"A new painting is a unique event, a birth, which enrichesthe universe as it is grasped by the human mind, by bringing a new form into it." - Henri Matisse
"Everyone could be seeing at different levels if it weren't for glasses" - Andy Warhol
_x__ The website must include an Introduction that addresses the reader and introduces the project, providing any necessary background information: Include your Introduction (or a description of it) here:
Introduction
by Heather Marcelle Crickenberger
This project began as an inquiry into the virtual. As a college writing instructor, I was awarded a course release in the Spring 2016 semester so that I might use the time to redesign my class so that it would better reflect our program's Student Learning Outcomes. My proposal is available under the page, Course Redesign Award. In the document, I propose that I would study my own teaching methods by doing my own homework with the class. The idea was to place myself closer to the vantage point of the students so that I could have a deeper understanding of the way my writing assignments work. Thus the website you are now reading was somewhat stereoscopic from the beginning, in that it combines two perspectives into a more "3-dimensional" product. Here, I am writing from the perspectives of both student and teacher; and my audience is both students and teachers. This portfolio is to be used to help provide a concrete example of a final portfolio so that students who need guidance might benefit in their own work. I also hope that it will add to the conversation our writing program has been having about portfolios in our curriculum.
In order to underscore this double-vision and to explore the manner in which media affects and functions as content, I chose to work with Google Cardboard, an open source and free virtual reality panoramic stereoscopic camera application. The Cardboard viewer can be purchased for less than $15.00 on Amazon and is widely available via other sources. Visitors who have access to this device should download the Cardboard images onto their phones and then view them using the Cardboard application. Visitors who don't have the viewer can view the files in panoramic two-dimensional format in the Virtual Reality Gallery.
My plan from the beginning was to create a 3-D virtual gallery for my artwork using the Cardboard camera. I had originally intended to find a gallery for my artwork in nature. The plan was to take Cardboard images of the place and then, using Photoshop, augment the virtual image by inserting my 2-D paintings into the stereoscopic files. After some experimentation, it became obvious that this was not only difficult to manage without a proper application to edit vr.jpg images, but that it didn't really make sense. Why not just put the images into the gallery and then record the image? Paintings are 2-D artforms afterall. What is gained by cutting and pasting them over top of a 3-D sterescopic image?
Once I decided to physically hang the pictures in the scene, my focus began to shift away from the task of editing Cardboard images and toward the concept of VR as a means of archiving the ephemeral. I have worked as an installation artist before, and one of the most heart-rending realities most installation artists must contend with is the fact that their art will likely come down: it will be dismantled and then either stored away a collection of artifacts or simply thrown into the garbage. Now that I have done this project, I have started to see how advances in image making are moving us toward a time when scenes--events--will be archivable in a much more digital sense. I can use the Cardboard images to inhabit the exhibition I created, even now that it has been taken down. The new technology of seeing turned a 1-day exhbition of light and nature and sumi ink paintings into a set of files that can be disseminated electronically. I have already shared this exhibition with people who live far away and I am able to return to this place and re-experience it even now that it no longer exists as it has.
I hope visitors can enjoy the exhibition in its flat online form as well as in the form of a three-dimensional virtual environment. I have included a Cardboard Gallery, a gallery of Stills from the install, as well as "Lapse", the short story I wrote as an extra credit Creative Challenge in my class; in it, I discovered the form that my exhibition would take, envisioning the corner of our backyard strung with lines hung with paintings the way people hang their clothes out to dry. The "Epilogue" serves as a restrospective reflective essay concerning the final project as a whole, and the "Letter to the Reader" addresses my students who are required to write a similar piece as well as my colleagues who are required to make visible the manner in which their classes support our Student Learning Outcomes in their annual activity reports. These segments are all viewable from the menu at the top of each page. I have also included a "Process" documentary button which provides links to various artifacts and writings concerning the creative process as I experienced it as a teacher doing her own assignments this semester.
To put it in terms of Walter Benjamin's aura, which is all that surrounds a work of art as it exists in space and time, as described in his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reporoduction (or Its Mechanical Reproducibility)"--instead of dislodging the works of art from their space in time through further remediation via digital authoring tools and special effects, I chose to use the Cardboard technology to record and preserve that aura. In the process, I learned that the term "virtual" really is nothing new. The word simply means "an approximation of reality." Artists and writers and film makers and so many others have been working in the virtual for centuries. It is only with the Cardboard viewer that I was able to see this, and I hope others can see this as well.
Thank you for your time and enjoy!
__x_ The website must feature an exhibition of your own creation. This text should speak to the focus (or a focus) of your semester-long inquiry project. You are free to use any medium so long as your exhibition can be represented and experienced via your website. Include your text or a description of your text here:
My exhibition is comprised of three galleries--one virtual gallery comprised of Google Cardboard files that document by an installation of art I enacted in my backyard, one gallery showing the actual paintings themselves in flat edited form, and one gallery that displays stills taken from within the installation. I also chose to include the short story I wrote as a response to our Robot Creative Challenge (extra credit) because writing this story actually gave me the idea for the installation design.
_x__ The website must include a Reflective piece of writing that addresses the reader and reflects upon and analyzes the exhibition. Include your Reflection or a description of your Reflection here:
Imagining, Constructing, and Capturing the Aura:
A Retrospective Look at Ephemeral Art Forms Using Google Cardboard
by Heather Marcelle Crickenberger
Sunday, May 1, 2016
Charlotte, North Carolina
The exhibition has come and gone. I had one human visitor and several animals and insects. I did not serve wine or cheese nor did anyone buy anything. The paintings are now stacked in the studio, to be archived, framed or tucked away. The journal sits nearly full--the last few pages saved for a final thought of some kind. The other day, I organized all the digital images and short writing assignments I had created this semester so that they may be somewhat accessible. The line has been taken down, the clips piled in a handful inside.
I have since produced three more paintings and rehung a the exhibition in a different configuration using cotton line instead of nylon; I used wooden clothespins instead of colored paperclips. I only included the images I liked best and I moved them around so that they could share the light. I did not take any Cardboard images of the second hanging--and I'm not sure why. It would have been easy to do, but I didn't think about it until after I ripped it all down in a hurry for fear of rain--but there are several stills of that layout included in the gallery of stills.
Last night, a friend "visited" the exhibition using the Google Cardboard device. A frozen series of moments snatched in shifting patterns of light then stitched together to produce a narrow swath of 3-D details. The above and below are disappointingly blurred. I have PANO images I have taken but not yet worked with. They capture the ceiling and the floor, but not the depth. In both casees, it's not really like being there, but it's closer than I've ever been able to take somebody to an event they had not attended. Or is it?
In "Lapse", the short story I wrote before I had decided what form my virtual gallery would take, I was able to include haptic sensations and thought. Language gave me the ability to conjure images based on consensus. I wonder if visitors who read the story would recongnise the exhibition they read about in the images. I don't believe I describe a single painting in the story...perhaps that would be something to add. What I walked away realizing is that there's still a lot that language can do that the image can't, whether you are immersed in it or just looking at it hanging in a tree.
In terms of the paintings themselves, they will aways be connected by this narrative, their subjects all connected to my own personal experiences. I can throw these images out into the world as 2-D stills or in 3-D virtual spaces. Transmissions are never lossless, however. You may be able to read excerpts from the journal I was writing in when I was making the paintings, but those entries are also just approximations, overlaid with narratives--grand and peculiar--inextractable from their thisness...censored thought--code--all bound by their unique situatedness in many particular moments.
We advance through inquiry by such approximations--by leaps and shuffles. Like thought, the questions move us forward and back. We have moments of illumination and moments of reflection--moments of disillusionment and of distraction and inspiration. It is all part of the work of inquiry--all part of the aura that hangs about it. This project aims to make some small part of that visible to others.
__x_ The website must include a Process Documentary of at least 750 words and 7 images that tells the story of and reflects upon the manner in which you created your exhibition (Different from Reflection). Include the text of your Process Documentary here (include small versions of the images and be sure to caption them and credit them to their source if they are not of your own making):
Process
I went through several ups and downs in my research into the virtual this semester. On the philosophical side, I really enjoyed looking into the concept of virtual reality. It is the ultimate realization of Descarte’s mind-body problem, bypassing as it does, the million-year-old connection between our eyes and our brains and forces its users to ask some interesting questeions. As I traversed this subject, I encountered many new texts and got to revisit many I had worked with in the past—Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard. I watched The Matrix trilogy and Videodrome, Tron (the original one) and Waking Life. I also read several blogs and web pages that dealt with the subject of VR and offered tutorials in how to make and edit it.
My original plan had been to create a VR gallery for my art work. I wanted to place my paintings in a beautiful setting and enable people to move around and explore them—the way that Google Cardboard allows you to wander through the Palais Versailles and examine the paintings there. For much of January and February, I experimented with creating my own VR files and figured out how I could edit the images. I found PANO’s to be more versatile than .jpg.vr’s. They don’t have the stereoscopic function or the sound files that Carboard includes so I was able to edit them easily. The Cardboard files were a different story. It was around the time in my process that I started running Photoshop filters on the stereoscopic images that I realized that there were truly physical side effects to working with VR, especially in experimental ways. I was in over my head. I decided that instead of ruining my eyesight, I would rethink the idea of the virtual and then bring that back to my project.
All the while that this inquiry was going on, it was late winter, and the arc of the sun placed a lovely fall of light right over my workspace in my studio. I would come down there around 10 in the morning to find the entire studio glowing with light. It was the kind of light that artists dream about—imbuing all that it touched with a layer of magic. I painted regularly through late winter—refining an old technique I had developed in response to the hyper viscous qualities of sumi ink many years ago. The first piece was, in my opinion, my best so far. It was done in true sumi style—all as one motion. In traditional sumi painting, the practice is considered a form of meditation—one gesture: one image. The practice goes back millenia and has been tied to the art of sword play:
I would begin by painting with water and then using an eye dropper to release pigment onto the surface and to search out a form. A lot of times, I didn’t know what I was thinking or feeling until the painting was done. I made over forty of these sorts of paintings and lovingly called them my Procrastination series. The light in the studio outlasted the cold but at the time that I am writing this, the studio is shadowed by spring foliage, now only getting afternoon sun for less than an hour each day. I have moved my workspace out of doors since then and set up on our porch where the light is even better on pretty days.
This semester has been a particularly trying time for me and my family. We have been taken to extremes of sorrow as we have faced births and cancer diagnoses. These events have colored all that I have done this semester.
For the final project, I drew on imaginative work done to comlete my Creative Challenge extra credit assignment. You can find this assignment and the first draft under the Process tab at the top of this page. At the time that I was working on the story, I was also finishing up a book chapter on "combinatory learning" and writing in engineering. I was working on a chapter for publication in a book called Creative Ways of Knowing in Engineering, to be coming out in the next year. This chapter was about these sorts of exercises--the rule-based writing challenges. In it, I explained how it had emerged from a studio drawing class I took when I was a grad student.
Although I had done the Creative Challenge before, I had never done the Robot assignment. In the story, I explore the age old creator-creation story that we see in narratives like Genesis and Pinochio in so far as it could be pressed in the context of digital vision--virtual reality--and artificial intelligence. The question that drove the story was, "Can a robot tell the difference between the real world and the digital world?" Upon completing the assignment, I had no answer--but wondered, "Can a human?"
The story not only allowed me a chance to stretch out some of my thoughts that had been building as a result of all the inquiry journals I had to write for the class. It also gave me a space to invision a virtual space. In the story, I describe a virtual reality exhibition of art that is comprised of paintings strung up on clotheslines. Once I got the idea of how I might hang an exhibition for a virtual reality recording, I started to find ways and means of making it happen. By using a natural environment to offset the artworks--one that I might be able to film using the Carboard camera and then offer via this website as a viewable space for other Cardboard users--the process of assembling the exhibition became pretty easy: I simply used what was at hand.
I didn't have to climb any trees. I used a footstool to string the line up a little higher than head-level and I did my best not to upset a mother robin who had obviously set up a nest close by. Until she jumped out at me chirping aggressively, I had not considered how all the line strung up in the trees could complicate a bird's world--makes you think.
When I was done stringing the line, I fastened the images to it. For the first draft of the exhibition--the one available to view in the Carboard Gallery--I included all the paintings I did this semester as well as the glass head that had served as my inspiration for the character of Hettie in "Lapse". In retrospect, the use of a glass head to represent silicon-based lifeforms seems like a good choice. I chose the location of the vantage point for my Cardboard images carefully, hoping to capture all the images in one sweep. When I was done, I placed a mat in the center of the exhbition and spent some time looking at the way the paintings appeared amidst the natural surroundings. I shot a few Cardboard images from this seated vantage point, waiting a for the sun to move, and shot the exhibition a few more times, sometimes sitting, sometimes standing with various cameras and in several formats.
Before weather could ruin the paintings, I disassembled the exhibition and brought it inside. A few days later, I restrung the entire thing using cotton line and wooden clothespins instead of the nylon and plastic paperclips I'd used or the first draft. This assemblage was only photographed with my DSLR. I did not take Cardboard images of this one and I only included my very favorite paintings here. I realized with line strung up the way it was, I had several planes to work between for viewing the paintings. I played around with how lines in the foreground of the digital images I took could interact with lines in the background. It was a neat effect. Perhaps next time, I could print out the images and string those up...or I could cut and paste them into a Cardboard file....
In between the two drafts of the exhibition, I produced this website which is designed to meet the Specifications and Requirements laid out in the tab under the Process bar in the menu.
While building the website, I decided to arrange the tabs somewhat strangely, placing the Exhibition tab first, where a Home page link might be expected. I decided to use the Exhibition tab to create just a title page for the exhibition as a whole. I realized too late in the semester that some of the Specifications and Requirements were a bit redundant and that they might well be revised for next semester. The galleries of stills and Cardboard images, along with the page that features the short story "Lapse" are all parts of the Exhibition, as well as the Process documentary section, the Introduction, the Epilogue and the Letter to the Reader, which ties the project to the University Writing Programs' Student Learning Outcomes. All of these parts and some supplementary materials can be accessed by the toolbar at the top of each page.
The deadline for this project is tomorrow, and while I had made a point to get a decent version of my portfolio up before the weekend so my students could use it as a reference, I find myself just like many of them are right now, down to the night before, proofreading--and finding mistakes.
The final thing I will do when I have proofed everything over and made sure that all my pages show and that they look okay from another person's computer, is to cut and paste all of the content here into a Word document version of the Specifications and Requirements Cover Sheet mentioned previously. Then I will be done!
_x__ All material in the website must be publically accessible without the need to download software or sign up for an account of any kind. Powerpoint presentations and Prezzies are forbidden. Please test your site on someone else’s computer to make sure all of its components have been made publically accessible.
__x_ No component in your entire entire website should be larger than 5,000 KB. Larger files may be attached as “READ MORE” links but that material will not be considered except tangentially in the assessment of the final portfolio website.
__x_ Fonts should be standard, clear and legible. Font colors should contrast with background and font color to ensure readability. Paragraph-sized text should be in a very dark font on a very light background, preferably black on white. Explain why you chose the fonts you chose here:
I chose Times New Roman (size 24) for the majority of my text as I find it to be most readable.
_x__ Color should be used to enhance your text but without disrupting readability or overpowering the other images. Explain how you use color in your website here:
I use muted backgrounds so as not to distract from the use of color in my images and paintings.
( __N/A_ ) If you create animation or videos of any sort, be sure that they do not take an excessive amount of time to load (excessive being more than 30 seconds) or watch (4:00 minutes max for entire website). If you would like to use a larger video, you must indicate in the caption which parts are to be watched (see 2:14-:3:26) and that time should not exceed 4 full minutes of viewing time for the entire portfolio website. Links to videos used as sources of research can be included without their time contributing to 4-minute limit. Explain how you use animation or video here:
( _N/A__ ) (If your exhibition involves any computer programming/coding of your own creation, please explain what you did here: )
__x_ Images should be of reasonable quality and appropriate size and should be titled or captioned, citing any sources (when available) with captions that stand out in a slightly different font than the rest of the text. All images used as decoration and background must be of your own making. Please do not use stock images or videos to decorate your website template. Upload your own. Explain how your portfolio website uses images here:
My exhibition is comprised primarily of images--there are the images that make up my story, the images of the exhibition, the Cardboard images, and the paintings themselves.
_x__ The website must make use of sound. Explain how your website uses sound here:
I chose to include an 8-hour video of birds singing on each page to create a sense of continuity between the pages. The video was posted off-grid but is still visible depending on the display settings.
_x__ The website must include movement. Explain how your website uses movement here:
Movement is required of the viewer of the Carboard files in my virtual gallery. The viewer, unfortunately, must go through many motions to experience the Cardboard images. First they must order, retrieve and assemble the viewer, a sort of rough origami process; then they must download my .vr.jpg images to their phone and then open the images in Google Cardboard; then they must slide the phone into the viewer and then move their head around a full 360 degrees if they want to see the entire exhibition.
__x_ The website must be interactive. Explain how your website is interactive here:
My website is interactive in that it requires the visitor to click the tabs to progress through the exhibition. Reading is also interactive; so is looking at paintings and participating in virtual reality environments.
__x_ All sources and components used must be credited to their author(s), preferably by a direct link to the primary electronic text used or a standard bibliographic citation in a Works Cited Page (please paste Works Cited Page here and include a tab on your web site called “WORKS CITED” to include outside sources cited or directly referenced on your web site.):
__x_ References to artifacts, places, and other sources must be described and pictured whenever possible. Please be mindful in choosing your sources. Explain how outside sources function in your portfolio website here:
_x__ Your web site must include a Letter to the Reader reflecting on the work you have done this semester (different from the Reflection) and explaining how you have engaged the SLOs laid out in the syllabus. Please put each SLO in italics and be sure to talk about ALL FIVE. Include your Letter to the Reader here:
Letter to the Reader
Dear Reader,
I am writing this letter to explain how my e-portfolio and the work that went into its creation demonstrates that I have met the Student Learning Outcomes required by this course. This letter is intended to address other instructors in the UNC-Charlotte University Writing Programs and to fullfill the requirements of the Course Redesign Award.
Introduction
This project emerged out of a Course Redesign Award for a Freshman Writing Course at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte offered by their University Writing Programs called "Writing and Inquiry in Academic Contexts." In an effort to better understand my own teaching, I set out to do something I had rarely done in my seventeen years as a college instructor: my own homework. I chose to perform an inquiry into the virtual. This portfolio explains how that inquiry evolved and provides an exhibition which my research and writing this semester helped me to create.
The purpose of the Course Redesign Award was to give instructors more time to think through and research the work they were doing as teacher so that our courses might better reflect the University Writing Program's Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs). These outcomes can be listed as follows: Rhetorical Knowledge, Critical Reading, Composing Processes, Knowledge of Conventions, and Critical Reflection. As part of doing my own homework, I was required to present a Semester-Long Inquiry Project as an e-portfolio which must include an Introduction, an Exhibition, an Epilogue, a Process Documentary, and this Letter to the Reader. The Letter to the Reader is required to address each of the above SLOs and to explain how my portfolio engages them.
As I continue on, I am already aware that even this essay is a rendering of stereoscopic vision. I used an inquiry into the virtual to help me improve the way that I teach a writing class. This connection between the virtual and writing is somethingn I came to think quite a lot about this semester and will be engaged elsewhere in the Introduction. I hope that the students had a similar experience, as they pursued their own interests with the secondary purpose of meeting the SLOs.
The Semester-Long Inquiry Project
Everyone in the class was free to choose the subject of their Semester-Long Inquiry Project and the medium in which they presented their final exhibition, granted the medium was accessible via the e-portfolio. A Calendar of due dates was provided and was comprised of several small writing assignments and critique sessions. I built a great deal of flexibility into the calendar assigning which enabled students to choose how they structured their time working on the project. Some students skipped all the early options and were forced to compress their work into the second half of the semester, while others started early, worked steadily and found their time to open up toward the deadline. I took the middle path, though it was against my procrastinating nature, and worked on the small writing assignments sporadically throughout the semester. I'm not sure if the freedom was a good thing for everybody, but I do think that the freedom taught all of us something about ourselves.
I personally generated an enormous amount of material with these writing assignments. There were two kinds: Process Journals and Inquiry Journals. Process Journals required us to write 300 words about our process plus 1 "image of own making" (to be interpreted as students saw fit). For a perfect score, we had to write 15 of these. We also had to write 15 Inquiry Journals that were 500 words of thinking on the page plus a bibliographic citation that had been annotated in summary and as relevant to the overall project. As the materials of the course, we were required to purchase a sketchbook and to secure an optional $40 for research purposes. I purchased a Moleskine journal and a small Sketchbook for visual work: both were filled by the end of the term.
Composing Processes
The Process Journals were intended to connect to the Composing Processes SLO to raise student awareness of their own writing processes and to see the writing processes of others at work. The were also intended to create a space for the mind to think about the project. The sketchbooks were intended to shift students' perspectives and get them to look at multimodal writing as an art form, one that can frame research, thought and inquiry and allow others access to it. I found that my own process was much more productive as a result of the assignments. The deadlines helped structure my time and I ended up creating a block of time on Mondays to work on the Semester-Long Inquiry Project. I became aware of what light I worked best in, what kind of music I needed to listen to, whether or not the TV should be on or off. I generally became more mindful of the way that I was approaching the project.
Critical Reading
The Critical Reading SLO was the primary focus of the Inquiry Journals which forced us all to engage voices other than our own and to make connections between them and our own. We were allowed to create our own reading list and the definition of reading was expanded to include images, music, artifacts, places, and people. I watched an Andy Warhol documentary, the Matrix Trilogy, Waking Life, Videodrome, Tron (original version), Black Mirror, and various other virtual reality-related productions. I paid attention to what it was like to ride a train to Raleigh. I thoroughly documented my process and went back over it to see if I had missed something that was staring me in the face. I often did.
Rhetorical Knowledge
Rhetorical Knowledge is a difficult concept for me to grasp. There's something a bit presumptuous in believing you can ever have knowledge about the rhetorical intentions of others. How many times have your own intentions been subverted without your knowledge? You'll never know, right? I do think focusing on the concept of rhetoric is useful though, and we engaged it in a very simplistic way, using a triangle.
The purpose of the triangle which we returned to again and again throughout the semester, was to remind students to consider the terms within it. The triangle could have been a hexagon and probably a little neater. The geometry of the relations is not exact but it is a quick reference reminder, and it helped me as I had to constantly redefine my medium throughout the semester as I grappled with unfamiliar ones and the literature surrounding them. Keeping an audience in mind, being able to clearly define the text you are creating, and understanding how to present yourself as a speaker within a given context and venue are a good introduction to rhetorical thinking. I hope that students will be able to flip the model in their analysis of the texts of others as the pursue their academic disciplines. I much prefer this model to the ones that emphasize intention and purpose as it puts a lot of emphasis on media, which was at the very heart of my own inquiry project and what I was asking my students to do by composing an e-portfolio. My audience with this letter is my colleagues and my students. The audience of my exhibition is the general public--art lovers, VR experimenters, science fiction readers as well as those who find themselves here by chance.
Knowledge of Conventions
Knowledge of Conventions is a tricky SLO to deal with, especially in a time when innovation and out-of-the-box thinking is so hot on the jobs market. I think of all my assignments as a set of conventions the class must acclimate to, and I also ask students to take an online tour of websites similar in theme and/or feel to their own. Students should be able to identify the expectations of their audiences, whether or not they choose to satisfy or undermine them.
In terms of my exhibition, I am observing the conventions of photography exhibition in its hardcopy form--I am drawing on the beauty of nature for my frame--and I am following the format (though in digital form) of the old coffee table art books you used to find laying around everywhere before the internet.
Critical Reflection
The last SLO is Critical Reflection. I feel that this particular outcome is infused into the course. As an inquiry project, we must ask questions. We must step back and look, analyze, read--and we must move in closer. It's a process that cannot be separated from academic writing, and yet it doesn't have to be academic to be useful. Being able to turn that critical eye on yourself is probably the most valueble application of this kind of thinking. Students reflected throughout their critique presentations, in the preparation of drafts, in their Process Journals, Inquiry Journals, in their sketchbooks, silently before their computer screens or walking through an art exhibition.
As for my critical reflection in this project, I have spent many hours by now doing it. The conveying of that reflective faculty is another project in itself. How can I make you see the exhibition through my eyes and understand all that underlies it? You can lay my vr.jpg file over your eyes, but you still won't get all the references. You'll still bring your own experience to play. What does it remind you of? What does that look like? Aren't those two kinda the same? I can only imagine what my audience will think as well. It really depends on what they're looking for at the end of the day, so my audience is on the journey, so-to-speak, living the dream.
Afterthoughts
These SLOs are all just habits of mind good thinkers develop over time. I feel like the semester has reminded me to be more critical and to think a bit more deeply about the rhetorical choices I make, whether it be as a virtual reality exhibition of paintings and short stories or if it is simply my class syllabus. There is one assignment I have not mentioned here--a few in fact. Students had to take a walk; they had to visit a library and do research there; they had to visit an exhibition; and for extra credit, they had the opportunity to do my Creative Challenge Exercises which helped me fuse together the inquiry work I have always done with media and language with the concept of the virtual, which had dominated my theoretical life. I feel the theory and practice coming together in me when I do projects like this and in many ways, it is this kind of work that makes me the happiest.
__x_ The contents of this completed Cover Sheet should be printed and stapled and should be presented at the beginning of class on the assigned due date.
_x__ This Cover Sheet should also be uploaded as a Word document to the appropriate portal on Moodle prior to the deadline.
